A major turning point for mankind will be when we change our time horizon for societal actions from a very short term to long term ie one generation or more. Our ability to make real changes is now very high, but all our systems are geared towards short term thinking. eg in the USA we believe that sending lots of folks into jail for low level transgressions is good, but doing so we place massive amounts of folks outside of society and break them for good – the long term impact is just awful. eg if we let a generation grow without proper education, the short term impact is nothing, but it breeds disaster in the long run, which will have no quick fixes.